Below are profiles of past ASA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (ASA DDRIG) Recipients. Click below to view a specific cohort year.
2023 ASA DDRIG Recipients
Jonathon Acosta (Brown University), Rust Belt Survival: Economic Decline and Immigrant Incorporation in New England
Why do migrants move to destinations that are seemingly undesirable (scandal-ridden, economically deprived, cold and costly)? How do they become incorporated after arrival and how do they change the local society? I address these questions in a community study of Central Falls (CF), Rhode Island, an extreme case of rust belt decline and deindustrialization, where immigrants have grown the population, contributed to a Latinx demographic majority and assumed increasingly prominent places in politics. I ask what lured these migrants to CF, where they work, whether and how they pursue social and spatial mobility, and how they have been incorporated into city politics. I seek answers to these questions with a combination of methods including an original household survey, a case-control study of upwardly mobile high school graduates, interviews with community residents and political stakeholders, ethnographic observations, historical census data and GIS mapping, and unique access to city records. The study engages an oft ignored group in the literature on rust belt decline to better understand what draws them to a place like this and sustains them when they arrive. The results of this work will yield insights into debates on migration, immigrant incorporation, Latinx politics and rustbelt urban development in the 21st century.
Nafeesi Andrabi (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), Making Muslims Legible in Population Health Research: Evidence from Birth Outcomes among Muslim Immigrant Women in the US between 2005 and 2019
There is considerable evidence of sustained global anti-Muslim racism and established literature linking structural and interpersonal racism to adverse health outcomes. Research focusing on race rather than religion or national original, coupled with our reliance on broad racial categories that classify Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa as white, or Muslims from countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan as Asian, limits our understanding of the mechanisms through which racism can produce health inequities for Muslims. My project uses a population-based quasi-experimental and longitudinal study design with restricted-use files of U.S. natality data from 2005 to 2019. I identify immigrant Muslim women using a novel methodological approach and focus on two adverse birth outcomes – low birthweight and preterm birth – as markers of maternal stress to further our understanding of health among this important but often invisible population. First, I identify trends in adverse birth outcomes among immigrant Muslim women, focusing on variations by ethnoracial categorization and geography. Then I examine whether domestic and transnational sociopolitical shocks that generate anti-Muslim sentiment affect Muslim maternal stress and subsequent birth outcomes. This project contributes to sociological research on structural racism, immigration, and health inequities and informs ongoing debates about disaggregating broad pan ethnic and racial categories.
Lauren M. Beard (University of Chicago), The Transition Shock: Emancipating into State-Defined Adulthood
Almost four million referrals were made to the U.S. child welfare (CW) system in 2021, and the number of children who aged out of CW was over 20,000. Youth who “age out” are discharged from care, meaning that they reached the formal age limit of the system (most often 21 years old) before they were stably placed in a long-term home. Within the first year of aging out, youth often experience housing insecurity, psychiatric crises, and more, yet over 60 percent disengage from available supports within the first month of exit. Why do youth disengage so often, and how do they navigate their transition without such supports? To address these questions, I utilize longitudinal interviews with Illinois-based youth – in coordination with national administrative data and interviews with staff – to better understand this so-called “transition cliff.” In doing so, this study contributes to literatures spanning political and medical sociology via an understudied state system and critical life phase. Its resultant theoretical and empirical insights further address how policy frameworks shape youth disengagement during this process, as well as how youth navigate the transition out of the child-serving social safety net.
Valentina Cantori (University of Southern California), Imagining Inclusion: How Muslim Ethno-Religious Advocates Craft Public Images in U.S. Civic Life
U.S. Muslims continue to be one of the most stigmatized groups in the country. A growing number of Muslim advocacy organizations want to change negative narratives and policies towards Muslims by pursuing what I term “inclusion projects.” They craft and circulate “acceptable”public images of Muslims in hopes of promoting better and more opportunities for attaining full cultural and political membership in U.S. society. Any inclusion project must negotiate difficult trade-offs, but these are compounded for Muslims, who are marginalized as non-Christians and also as immigrants or racial others. How do Muslims craft images that facilitate acceptance without obscuring the racial, national, and religious differences inside American Islam? Through participant observation in two advocacy organizations, I will reveal which images of U.S. Muslims are adopted for wide circulation and which are rejected. In addition, the study shows how Muslim inclusion projects manage trade-offs, sometimes perpetuating as well as challenging racial, national, or religious exclusion. We learn not only how advocates construct U.S. Muslim identity for public consumption as they imagine pathways to inclusion, but also how the minefield of multiple exclusions in U.S. civic life complicates any inclusion project.
Debadatta Chakraborty (University of Massachusetts-Amherst), Hindutva and Hinduphobia: Gendered-Racialized Youth Mobilization and Religio-Nationalist Politics of the Indian Diaspora in the US
This project examines the rise of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) in India and its connection to diasporic youth mobilization, centering the nationalist politics of the Indian diaspora within the U.S. I compare the experiences of Indian youth in India and the U.S., focusing on how they get exposed to Hindu nationalist messages through the work of organizations that operate in India and within the U.S.-Indian diaspora. I investigate how Indian youth in India and Indian American youth in the U.S., often inspired by multicultural perspectives, understand Hindutva, how the movement mobilizes the youth, both as supporters and as resisters, and how these processes are gendered and racialized. Combining global ethnography, archival work, and interviews in the U.S. and in India, I analyze debates over pedagogy aimed at Indian/Indian-origin youth in both countries, to understand how these organizations mobilize nationalist ideologies, rituals, and material resources to pursue their goals, through transnational networks. The project addresses key concerns within transnational political sociology, sociologies of education, youth organization, gendered-racialized religion, and sociologies of South Asia. Implications from this project will inform policymakers, local governments, and community education/youth programs which lobby local politicians to build and defend inclusive democracies.
Emily Ekl (Indiana University-Bloomington), The Effects of Status and Structure: Examining the Provision of Care by Allied Health Professionals across Two Organizations
The U.S. healthcare system has become increasingly specialized, influencing where and from whom patients obtain health services. More than ever, healthcare professionals are likely to work for large, bureaucratic organizations, where nearly 60% are allied health professionals (AHPs), or mid-status healthcare professionals who are not doctors or nurses. To date, organizational research on healthcare delivery has been largely limited to doctors and excluded AHPs. This project seeks to understand how both professional status and organizational context constrain mid-status healthcare workers’ decision-making and patient care. How do AHPs provide care? How do they coordinate care within the context of their organizations? What are the formal regulations and informal rationales that shape their actions within their organizations? To understand how micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors impact the ways AHPs carry out their responsibilities across organizational settings, I am conducting a comparative ethnography examining how one allied health profession, speech-language pathology, operates across two healthcare organizations: an out-patient specialty clinic and an in-patient generalist hospital. The knowledge produced by this study will contribute to organizational theory and the sociology of health with implications for the implementation of context-specific healthcare policy.
Jenny Enos (Rutgers University), The Perception of Threat: A Comprehensive Examination of Immigration-Related Threats and Attitudes
Sociologists have long argued that anti-immigrant sentiment is in part driven by perceptions among native-born people that immigrants pose some sort of “threat.” However, little is known about these threat perceptions, how they are associated with each other, and how they affect attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy. In my dissertation project, I broaden previous conceptualizations of immigration-related threat to test the salience of six types of threat – economic, cultural, criminal, sexual, demographic, and biological – on both the individual and group level. I ask: 1) Which threats are most salient and to whom? 2) Are different immigrant groups more strongly associated with some kinds of threats than others? 3) How are threat perceptions cognitively organized alongside attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy? To answer these questions, I will conduct two survey experiments to examine the various aspects of how threats are perceived by respondents. To contextualize the findings from the survey experiments, I will also collect social media data from Twitter to assess the prevalence of each threat dimension in rhetoric around immigration from media and political elites. This research will provide important empirical evidence to help us better understand anti-immigrant sentiment and to inform interventional tools to improve attitudes toward immigrants.
Sara-Laure Faraji (University of Maryland-College Park), The Defendant Wears Prada: Evaluating the Impact of Defendants’ Sartorial Choices on Criminal Justice Outcomes
Research has documented that physical characteristics such as skin tone and the presence of tattoos can change the severity of punishment for defendants. However, research has often focused on aspects of appearance that are difficult to change. Despite clothing being a core and modifiable component of defendants’ appearance, which can impact relevant criminal justice decisions, there is limited empirical research testing this relationship. By combining experimental survey methods with AI techniques, this study will test how the public’s punishment recommendations differ based on defendants’ clothing and will investigate whether the relationship between a defendant’s clothing and the public’s attitudes towards guilt and punishment are contingent on defendants’ gender, race, and the nature of the offense. By exploring a potential explanation for some of the disparities identified in the criminal justice system, this study will also have practical implications. Identifying how clothing may elicit or exacerbate biases in decision-making is the first step in reducing a source of potential bias that could be contributing to existing disparities in the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, the absence of a relationship could suggest other ways to allocate resources in a defendant’s defense.
Luis Rubén González Márquez (University of California-Merced), A Clean Source for a Sustainable Future? The Dynamics of Contention Escalation on Renewable Energy Extraction in the Global South
How do conflicts over renewable energy projects emerge and escalate? Why do these projects have a great potential for collective violence? The goal of this research is to understand the escalation of contentious social movements around renewable energy projects in countries of the Global South. Specifically, I examine how multidimensional threats from extractivism – from environmental devastation, to economic dispossession, to cultural destruction of community ties – are constructed, and foster the emergence of protest. Combining insights from social movements and environmental sociology, I employ a comparative historical design based in six cases of energy extractivist projects in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras between 1973-2019. Drawing from archives, newspapers, technical documents, focus groups and interviews, I will map the diverse pathways of conflict escalation surrounding renewable energy in these countries. I will examine how transnational demands from the global economy combine with national political dynamics and local protest-repression dynamics to contribute to conflict escalation. This project focuses on an understudied area in energy extractivism and expands our understanding of environmental social movements in the Global South. It will utilize an approach centered in mutual enrichment between Latin American and U.S. Sociologies and enrich discussions on renewable energies, large development projects and environmental conflicts.
Bowei Hu (University of California-Los Angeles), Families in the Red: How Banking Organizations Stratify Household Debt
Over the past 25 years, there has been a significant rise in household indebtedness across advanced democracies. Previous studies primarily attribute this trend to welfare retrenchment and financial market deregulation, often overlooking the crucial role that banking organizations play in allocating credit to households. This project illuminates the role of banking organizations in escalating household debt. Using organizational theories, it seeks to answer a central question: How do banks stratify household debt? To answer this question, I propose three unique organizational processes—the concentration, institutionalization, and diversification of banking systems—for empirical examination. Employing quantitative methods, I analyze three large-scale datasets to test these organizational processes. Overall, this dissertation not only contributes to the fields of organizational studies, economic sociology, and social stratification, but it also stimulates discussions on ways to democratize banking systems.
Michaela McMillian Jenkins (Emory University), Black Ethnicities & Cultural Organizations in Racialized Educational Institutions
Black cultural organizations (BCOs) serve a vital role supporting retention, identity formation, and success for Black students at colleges and universities. However, the ethnic diversity of the Black population in the United States has changed dramatically since their inception in the 1960s. Black immigrants and their children are disproportionately represented in U.S. higher education when compared to their Black American counterparts. Futhermore, the Supreme Court’s shift from affirmative action to diversity prompted educational institutions to change their racial rhetoric and behaviors. Through interviews, participant observation, archival research, and content analysis of institutional materials at three different higher education institutions, I investigate how the racialization of colleges and universities shapes how they incorporate Black cultural organizations into their diversity logics and examine how Black students navigate these spaces in the context of these administrative racial logics. This project will expand research on race and ethnicity, sociology of education, and organizations by examining how educational spaces function as racialized organizations. It also has implications for understanding intragroup relations on college campuses and how higher education might shape the success of Black students and provide pathways for Black interethnic solidarity.
Youbin Kang (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Solidarity and Disenchantment: Varieties of Public Transit Workers’ Pro-Social Labor Action in New York City and Seoul, 1970-2020
Public transit is the nervous system of a city and defines urban modernity in many cities around the world. Thus, transit workers’ labor movements have the potential to have far-reaching impacts. But organized labor, which has been critical to maintaining relatively stable wages and jobs, has declined worldwide. While United States and South Korea share some surprising similarities regarding labor politics, with similar levels of union density decline, South Korean trade unions have orchestrated more instances of labor action with solidaristic and pro-social motives that go beyond economic interests than the U.S. In this project, I examine the conditions that support labor action in these 2 countries. Drawing on a comparative historical analysis of archival sources and interview data of the Transport Workers Union Local-100 in New York and the Seoul Transit Labor Union, I ask: (1) How have public transit labor movement strategies shifted between 1970-2020? (2) Under what conditions and for what reasons do transit unions engage in solidaristic and pro-social labor actions? (3) How do race, class, and gender differently shape attitudes of solidarity or disenchantment toward labor actions? This research furthers understanding of the implications of urban politics, solidarity, and identity on organized labor.
Zhuofan Li (University of Arizona), Closed Corporations? Opening Science? Relational Work on the Knowledge Infrastructure of Artificial Intelligence Research
What is most puzzling about the rapid commercialization of artificial intelligence today is that it appears to be coupled with an unprecedented rise in open science. The post-WWII paradigm of science and scientific funding maintained porous yet definite boundaries between proprietary and public science. But today, corporate laboratories, especially in the U.S. and China, have become leading contributors to the infrastructure of open science. This project draws on the prototypical case of computer vision research to ask: What are the main forms of corporate participation in open science? How have U.S. and Chinese companies participated, and to what extent have they occupied brokerage positions in the open science of artificial intelligence? How does corporate open science shape the interorganizational, transnational flows of labor, knowledge, and research instruments? How does corporate open science shape the careers, practices, and identities of researchers? I combine longitudinal network analysis, computational text analysis, a unique dataset of digital traces left by global computer vision research from 2013 to 2021, and participant observations and in-depth interviews with corporate and academic researchers in Beijing and Silicon Valley, to study how market actors reengineer human knowledge and knowledge infrastructures in the age of open science and platform capitalism.
Katherine Maldonado Fabela (University of California-Santa Barbara),“Let us be the healing of the wound”: Child Welfare System Impacted Families and Mental Health
Social scientists have documented the linkages between surveillance and punishment and the effects on health. In this study I examine a branch of punishment and ask how Latina mothers experience institutional violence via the child welfare system (CWS), and how it affects their mental health. I draw from an intersectional qualitative approach using photo life history interviews and surveys with Latina mothers from Southern California who have been involved with CWS. This study advances understanding of institutional violence by examining: (1) post effects of CWS involvement for the mental health of mothers and (2) long-term coping and healing mechanisms they use under surveillance. In an era of family separation, my research will contribute to child welfare policy and provide recommendations to healthcare practitioners on how to deliver effective approaches to the mental health needs of criminalized mothers and children. This study offers one of the first documentations of the lives of Latina mothers through visual techniques that showcase how intersectional stigmatized statuses impact the life trajectories and health of families in the child welfare system. I will collaborate and share these findings with community members, health practitioners, academics, and policymakers in the hopes of promoting more healing-centered responses in healthcare.
Estéfani Marín (University of California-Irvine), Sibling Generation and Transmission of the Educational Capital in Latino/a and Asian American Families
How families generate and transmit educational advantages across generations is a central topic of social stratification research. Typically, this research draws attention to intergenerational inequality in parent-child relationships and often assumes that siblings are passive recipients of resources. My dissertation advances education and family research by examining an important but understudied educational resource: siblings. Previous sibling studies primarily focus on white families, concentrate on childhood and adolescence, and rely on the perspective of one family member. In contrast, I use a comparative research design using sibling dyads to better understand how culture-specific patterns shape the activation of sibling educational capital in the transition to young adulthood. I draw on 60 interviews with college students and supplemental interviews with siblings to examine how race/ethnicity, class, and gender shape exchanges of sibling educational capital in Latino/a and Asian American families. Although studies document how older siblings in Latino/a and Asian American families are sources of information during the college application process, questions remain about how siblings leverage educational resources beyond the college choice process and across race/ethnicity, class, and gender lines. This research contributes to our understanding of issues and dynamics related to the sociology of education, social mobility, family dynamics, and race and ethnicity.
Daniel A. Nolan IV (University of Washington), Stories from the End of the World: Narratives of the COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 Pandemic radically disrupted the social world across the globe and its effects are still being felt, even as the virus recedes into the background of social life. This pandemic is the kind of historical event that forces people to puzzle through unstable and unpredictable circumstances, using, discarding, and creating ways of making meaning as they do so. Using a longitudinal research design involving 4 rounds of interviews with the same participants over 3 years, my dissertation analyzes the stories people tell about their experience of the pandemic to better understand how people make sense of such an ambiguous and unprecedented worldwide disaster. Specifically, I examine how much and how successfully people use events of the past and interpretations offered by by public figures to make sense of the pandemic, and the strategies and circumstances under which people reject collective narratives to anchor their perceptions in the specific details of their lived experience. While public discourse about and during the pandemic has been oversimplified, polarized, and heavily politicized by government leaders and media spokespersons, this research reveals some of the complex variation and nuance in the perspectives and interpretations of ordinary people’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chiara Packard (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Prosecutorial Decision-Making Across Contexts
Prosecutors wield immense power in the criminal legal system, and yet we know little about how they make decisions. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork; interviews with prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and other system actors; and archival evidence in two mid-sized midwestern counties, I investigate how prosecutors make decisions as they process criminal cases. This project will contribute a more nuanced understanding of the social, cultural, and institutional factors that influence and inform the discretionary power of prosecutors. For example, my research identifies and explores a phenomenon I call “prosecution for services,” which describes how prosecutors sometimes charge an individual or recommend a probation sentence not to punish that person, but to connect them to social services available through the criminal legal system. This project adds to a growing body of literature that explores the connection between welfare and punishment by revealing how the blending of coercion and care can further criminalize poverty as street-level bureaucrats pull people into the criminal legal system in order to get them access to services.
Devon Reynolds (University of Colorado-Boulder), Understanding Organizational Change Among Institutional Investors in Response to Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaigns
Civil society groups have successfully convinced some large institutional investors to divest from fossil fuel companies in response to growing concerns about climate change and environmental injustice. Existing research has not addressed 1) why institutional investors take up demands for divestment from fossil fuels in some cases but not in others and 2) to what extent and in what ways these divestments promote environmental justice and/or low-carbon development. My dissertation investigates these questions through a comparative study of thirty pension funds, some of the largest and most influential institutional investors in the world. I approach these research questions using mixed qualitative methods in order to contribute to the literatures in environmental sociology and organizational change. My project will reveal the levers used to enact changes in financial organizations and whether these changes are effective at achieving their intended outcomes. My research will support recommendations to policy-makers, civil society members, and financial industry actors on how to improve climate- and environmental justice-related financial practices.
Shannon M. Rieger (New York University), Urban Diversity, Spatial Barricades, and Social Cohesion
Exclusionary land use practices like single-family zoning, minimum density restrictions, and gated communities are socially-sanctioned mechanisms for generating spatial segregation. Theory suggests that by decreasing opportunities for inter-group contact, these land use practices may inhibit macro-level social cohesion. I conduct three interlinked empirical projects designed to provide insight into the relationship between one such land use practice—gated communities—and social cohesion, leveraging several data sources including the restricted-use American Housing Survey, Corelogic MLS data, Facebook-derived social network data, and L2 voter data. The first project investigates the number and characteristics of gated communities and their residents across the U.S.; the second tests the hypothesis that gated communities are related to social network fragmentation; and the third asks how gated communities are related to civic (dis)engagement. My dissertation makes several sociological contributions. First, I bring exclusionary land use practices into sociological discussions around segregation, intergroup contact, and social cohesion. Additionally, I build a bridge between the spatial segregation and social networks literatures. I hope that my dissertation will provide a unique resource about gated communities for policymakers, urban planners, housing activists, housing developers, and others who are involved in debates about urban space and housing issues.
Giovanni Román-Torres (University of Michigan), Placing the American Dream: Latina/o Geographic Dispersion, Socioeconomic Well-Being, and Belonging across the American Landscape
Since the 1990s, recent Latina/o immigrants have not only continued settling in gateway cities like Los Angeles, but have also begun settling across the American landscape. Latina/o immigrants are one of the largest growing foreign born populations in the Midwest and South. Leveraging a multi-method approach, my dissertation first investigates the geographic dispersal of recent Latina/o immigrants across the U.S. between 1970-2019 using Census data. Building on current sociological understandings of Latina/os in the U.S. South, I use Census and immigration legislation data to investigate how state-level immigration legislation across the U.S. South may facilitate or impede the socioeconomic well-being of Latina/o immigrants in this region of the country. Finally, drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations in two field sites in Southeastern Tennessee, my dissertation offers a rich understanding of placemaking processes and ethno-racial identity formation of Latina/os in new places in the American South. Building on demographic, immigration, urban/rural, socioeconomic, and Latinx scholarship, I demonstrate that changes in Latina/o immigrant destinations have continued to grow in Southern regions of the U.S. and show how well-being, ethno-racial hierarchies, and placemaking processes continue to evolve in places that have historically been Black and White.
Randi Saunders (University of Texas-Austin), Young Adult Intimate Violence Victimization and Life Course Patterns of Social Integration and Allostatic Load Accumulation
The CDC reports that approximately 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men in the U.S. experience some form of sexual or intimate partner violence (SV/IPV) over their lifetimes. These forms of violence are associated with numerous adverse health outcomes, including acute injuries, chronic pain, hypertension, sleep disorders, and mental health conditions. SV/IPV victimization is highly stressful and disruptive. Chronic activation of the body’s fight-or-flight stress responses leads to “wear-and-tear” on physiological systems. Moreover, decades of research affirm the importance of social relationships for health, but stigma, abuser-imposed social isolation, and social withdrawal related to psychological distress may undermine SV/IPV survivors’ support systems, in turn undermining health. Using data from the National Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, this dissertation considers how SV/IPV victimization shapes preclinical disease risk markers and access to social support across multiple time points. Moreover, this dissertation considers how the social ramifications of SV/IPV victimization may contribute to the association between victimization and health. Ultimately, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of how stressful life events “get under the skin” by focusing on the mechanisms through which SV/IPV victimization undermines survivors’ health, with potential implications for clinical practice to support the well-being of violence victims.
Brittany Suh (City University of New York-Graduate Center), Illicit Blocks of Ethnic Enclaves: Asian Migrant Sex Work in the Ethnic Neighborhoods of New York and Los Angeles
While Asian immigrants are often considered “model minorities,” largely assisted by ethnic ties and resources within their ethnic communities and neighborhoods, they are also reported to be the most widely internationally-trafficked group in the United States. These trafficked individuals are often forced to work in illicit massage parlors or other illicit sexual businesses operating within those very ethnic neighborhoods. This study will examine how ethnic enclaves, and the ties, networks, and resources within them, shape the varying forms of sexual labor and life experiences of Asian immigrant women working in the illicit ethnic commercial sex industry. I will use a multi-method approach, conducting spatial analysis of ethnic neighborhoods, in-depth interviews and field work with workers and advocates serving this population, to better understand how Asian migrant sex workers negotiate their work, sexuality, agency, (il)legality, and community within and beyond the context of the ethnic enclave. Applying a comparative lens, this project will study cases in New York City and Los Angeles, the two cities known for their large Asian ethnic neighborhoods and communities and established ethnic commercial sex industries. This project aims to offer critical analysis of policies and intervention efforts that affect the daily livelihoods of the vulnerable workers and their communities.
Hannah Tessler (Yale University), The Stability of Singlehood? A Longitudinal Study of Single Adults’ Narratives about Singlehood and Dating Behaviors in the United States
Currently, while an estimated one-third of U.S. adults are single, and marriage rates are at record lows, less is known about what factors contribute to their decisions to remain single. Existing research on singles focuses broadly on three explanations: 1) single by choice, 2) single as temporary, and 3) single due to lack of desirability. However, not all singles are equally invested in romance and sex, as some singles do not aspire to lifelong monogamous romantic partnership. This dissertation explores the heterogeneity in preferences and dating behaviors among single adults in the United States. Drawing on in-depth interviews and original survey data, I argue for the potential that “single” may be a more stable social category than previously thought. My analysis focuses on how race, gender, and sexual/romantic orientation shape experiences of being single, and provides an intersectional perspective on the diversity of intimate relationships beyond marriage and romantic partnership. This research challenges the social significance of romantic love in ways that disrupt our understanding of kinship, relationships, and family. My research has implications for scholars, policymakers, and LGBTQ+ organizations seeking to recognize singlehood as a legitimate identity and to act against cultural norms and legal practices that privilege couples.
Thalia Tom (University of Southern California), Investigating Heterogeneous Neighborhood Effects on School Readiness by Child Race/Ethnicity and Income Background: 1997-2019
Within the United States, the neighborhood in which a child is raised shapes their educational prospects. In particular, neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage reduces the likelihood of educational attainment—a penalty disproportionately borne by low-income students and students of color. Less often considered are the ramifications of neighborhood disadvantage for educational outcomes in early childhood, a developmentally sensitive period that sets the stage for future trajectories. Given that skills observed at school entry predict subsequent achievement, and rising returns to education render such achievement valuable to individuals, communities, and society at large, identifying the factors that contribute to disparities in school readiness offers insight into processes of stratification that unfold before children enter the classroom. Drawing on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Census and American Community Survey, I employ causal inference techniques to investigate the consequences of neighborhood disadvantage for children’s school readiness. More specifically, my project attends to the dynamic nature of neighborhood effects by examining how effects differ by race/ethnicity and income and within changing neighborhoods. Results will imbue the neighborhood effects literature with novel temporal considerations and inform broader policy discussions on how to foster racial/ethnic and socioeconomic equity in early childhood and beyond.
Meghan Olivia Warner (Stanford University), Childbirth Choices: How Women Plan for and Experience Birth
This dissertation expands a sociological approach to studying pregnancy and childbirth. Public health scholars tend to study trends in pregnancy and childbirth outcomes using large datasets of quantifiable measures. The literature rarely centers pregnant women as agentic decision-makers operating within social constraints. I examine how women in the San Francisco Bay Area, in relation to their partners and their healthcare providers, plan for and experience birth. Women receive information from various sources, putting them in a position to make some choices, albeit constrained ones, about their pregnancy and birth. The web of possible choices is interrelated and highly dependent on the setting in which a woman gives birth. I ask: How do women form their birth preferences, what role do these preferences play in birth, and how do they shape women’s responses post-birth? How do class and race shape these preferences, birth experiences, and responses post-birth? To answer these questions, I use multiple qualitative methods – interviews, observations, and bi-weekly survey data – to study both pregnant women and healthcare providers. This research will improve our understanding of how decision-making before and during birth shapes a birthing person’s and their child’s well-being.
2022 ASA DDRIG Recipients
Enrique Alvear (University of Illinois-Chicago), Predictive Policing under the Ethnographic Microscope: Policy Mobilities and the Making of Policing in Santiago, Chile
In 2011, Santiago, Chile witnessed a critical shift from officer-driven crime control to an evidence-based form of policing that uses crime predictors and network models to predict where crime is likely to occur and who is likely to be involved. Supported by the Inter-American Development Bank and Altegrity Risk International, a global risk consulting company, the Chilean national police created the Tactical System of Crime Analysis (STAD). This data-driven predictive policing strategy expanded law enforcement’s interventions in marginalized areas experiencing high levels of deprivation and crime. Drawing on archival research, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic observations, I ask: (1) What explains this shift to predictive crime control that intensifies police forces in highly deprived urban areas? (2) How has STAD transformed policing practices on the ground and has it led to new forms of regulation of the urban poor? (3) What does STAD tell us about larger flows of economic capital, security experts and technologies, and penal policies between the global North and South? This research will provide empirical insights into the ongoing entanglements between predictive policing, democratization, and social inequality in the Latin American context, which will be of benefit to sociologists as well as policymakers interested in the intersection between domestic policing, globalization, and social inequality.
Matt Brooke (Harvard University), The Deep Policy Roots of Modern Right-Wing Media?
Research on conservative media in the United States typically analyzes the recent past. By contrast, I pursue a comparative and historical study that investigates the possible roots of conservative US media in the mid-20th century. In this era, most advanced democracies relied upon public broadcasting. The U.S., in contrast, was building its broadcasting system atop thousands of privately owned, lightly regulated local stations. Did this distinctive broadcasting structure contribute to conservative media’s rise in the U.S.? To investigate, I first study the U.S. case using an original panel dataset on U.S. radio stations from 1935-1985 that includes station-level data on conservative programming from 1965-1985. This panel will allow me to answer questions about the extent, causes, and geographic distribution of conservative broadcasting during a period often considered a golden age of media impartiality. Then I will analyze qualitative data from archival sources that shed light on whether activist broadcasters used local stations to bring media into alignment with the Republican Party. Finally, I conduct a cross-national comparison to examine whether different broadcasting frameworks during the mid-20th century contributed to the political alignments of present-day media. This project provides insight into why media systems change and how we might improve our media environment.
Katie Donnelly (Princeton University), Study of Education and Communication Surrounding Intrauterine Devices
Long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) use has increased dramatically in recent years. In particular, levonorgestrel intrauterine devices (IUDs) are quickly becoming the favored choice among health care providers across the U.S. and internationally who view them as unequivocally beneficial. Yet patients and reproductive justice activists raise concerns about IUDs being coercive and limiting patient autonomy, underscoring that IUDs are more likely to be prescribed to low income women and women of color, many of whom report feeling pressured to select or keep this method. Through interviews with physicians, patients, and industry representatives; ethnographic observations of digital and clinical settings; and primary document analysis, this project explores medical and lay narratives surrounding intrauterine devices (IUDs) with the goal of understanding how medical facts are constructed, transmitted, and negotiated between actors. In particular, this work asks how race, gender, and class structure IUD narratives and what implications this has for women’s health, especially for the health of poor women and women of color. By communicating my findings to sociologists, health-care practitioners, public health workers, and people who are using or considering birth control, I hope for this research to prompt reflection and reform in the field of medicine so that women may have true contraceptive agency.
Katie M. Duarte (Brown University), Tangled: Afro-Latinx Identity in the Natural Hair Movement in the Dominican Republic and New York City
Dominican identity has historically relied on a rhetoric of claiming Hispanic culture for its simultaneous proximity to whiteness and distance from Blackness. For Dominicans, a majority Black-descendant Latinx group, this translates to a laborious and expensive ritual of hair straightening. However, a cultural shift is occurring where curly hair and natural hairstyles associated with Blackness are becoming popular among Dominicans in the Dominican Republic and the U.S. This transnational project uses the changing norms of hair as a cultural tool to explore how Dominicans maintain and (re)interpret racial boundaries and identities. Through interviews with Dominicans in New York City and Santo Domingo about their personal histories of hair, this project studies how Dominicans negotiate their Black and Latinx racial identities and reinterpret hierarchies of race. Conjointly with observations of natural hair salons and analysis of curly hair social media content, it explores how physical and digital locations may serve as spaces to (re)define the presentation of the racialized self. The project will make empirical contributions to cultural sociology, continue to push public debate about the respectability of hair, and hopefully contribute to policy and legal measures that protect against race-based hair discrimination.
Jennifer S.K. Dudley (University of Notre Dame), The Cultural Capital of Political Incivility: Evaluating the Selection and Influence Effects of Professional Aspirations, Voter Choice, and Group Socialization
Incivility in politics is increasing in the United States, leading to more political polarization and legislative stagnation. I will bring sociological theories of cultural capital and authenticity to bear on interdisciplinary research on American politics to examine sources of political incivility in the U.S. Congress. I will leverage three distinct data sources—a nationally representative dataset, experimental vignettes, and automated text analysis of the U.S. Congressional Record–to investigate three questions: (1) Do the people who run for political office act more uncivilly than those who do not run? (2) Do Americans prefer political candidates who act uncivilly? (3) Once elected, do members become acclimated to Congressional culture and then demonstrate increases in uncivil behavior? I contribute to scholarship on political incivility by determining whether it is increasing because uncivil behavior facilitates access to political office or whether individuals become more uncivil after joining Congress. I also expand our sociological understanding of incivility by determining whether uncivil behavior can act as a power resource. I plan to develop courses and workshops on political engagement while also sharing findings with non-partisan pro-democracy groups and the public.
Dilan Eren (Boston University), The Self-Taught Economy: Open Access and Inclusion in the Tech Industry
Amidst its drastically growing labor needs and its long-standing claims to be meritocratic, the tech industry has increased its initiatives to lower the cost of entry to tech jobs. Over the last ten years, one specific initiative has been prominent: making learning to code available outside of computer science (CS) college education through online open-access coding platforms. Using a longitudinal, comparative, and mixed-method design, I focus on the learning and job-seeking experiences of aspiring developers without a CS degree. Drawing on three waves of the largest survey dataset available on this population, multiple waves of interviews with a diverse subsample of the 2021 survey respondents, content analysis, and digital ethnographic observations, I ask: can open access to coding skills help to reconfigure the labor composition in tech and make it more inclusive of persons who have historically been excluded? With its capacity to clarify the social, cultural, and technical advantages at play in building tech careers, this research contributes to the literature on social inequalities, labor market stratification, and the future of work. On the policy front, the findings of this research can provide insights into the design of future reskilling programs and DEI-focused labor market policies and industry initiatives.
Miriam Gleckman-Krut (University of Michigan), The Rainbow Nation and The Gays it Excludes: African Sexual and Gender Minority Refugees Living in a Modern South Africa
Unlike most major refugee recipient countries, South Africa explicitly provides for refugee status based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity (SOGI). At the same time, it denies refugee status to 96% of people who apply – including almost all SOGI applicants. South Africa at once leads the world in its liberal refugee provisions, and also in its rate of denial of refugee protections. Drawing from 11 months of participant observational and interview data in Cape Town-based refugee clinics, as well as a unique legal database of people who applied for refuge in South Africa based on persecution related to SOGI (n=88), I ask: (1) How does South Africa deny refugee status to African SOGI applicants, despite its remarkable laws protecting people fleeing persecution related to SOGI? Next, (2) What are the material and symbolic implications of these arrangements for the state and for the people it excludes? The project builds on theoretical work in political sociology and migration studies by examining the roles race, gender, sexuality, geopolitics, and colonial history play in contemporary state exclusions. I furthermore contribute extensive qualitative data on South-South migration to sociological investigations of refugees and to efforts to improve refugee status adjudication for SOGI applicants.
Laura Halcomb (University of California-Santa Barbara), Pricing Life: Money and Morality in Cancer Care
Patients, payers, and providers worry about rising healthcare costs in the US, and with good reason. The cost of medical treatment is a significant burden for both insured and uninsured patients. Cost is a considerable problem in oncology due to the high prices of cancer medications. Through in-depth interviews with cancer patients and cancer care providers in California, I will examine how physicians and patients make decisions about medical care and contend with the moral dilemmas posed by the cost of medicine. These decisions include the valuation of treatment, the morality of debt, and, ultimately, the worth of lives. This research will build on medical sociological theories of patient consumerism, economic sociological theories of valuation, and interdisciplinary scholarship on healthcare justice. My preliminary findings point to the importance of charity care in perpetuating unequal access to treatment. I will examine how patients and physicians grapple with the promise of new technologies alongside the burden of high costs. This research will address critical empirical questions about how providers can play a role in connecting patients with essential resources. I will share results with academics and physicians, healthcare administrators, policymakers, and research participants in hopes of contributing to equity in healthcare.
Emily Hillenbrand (Cornell University), Reconstructing the Model Man in Post-Conflict Burundi
My research follows an extended case study of rural men’s groups in post-conflict Burundi, called ‘Abatangamuco.’ After participating in a development intervention that fosters intensive critical reflection around gender norms, these men publicly embrace a new masculine subjectivity based on non-violence and a commitment to gender equality. Building on preliminary research I conducted in 2020, I will use ethnographic and participatory methods to examine how men use public testimonials of change to persuade other men to join their cause. I seek to understand: (1) How does the Abatagamuco group actively reconstruct masculine subjectivity? (2) What are the social rehabilitation functions of the group process and what social tensions does it (re)produce? (3) How do ideologies of development and transnational feminism shape the new social relations and emerging subjectivities? This study examines men’s strategies for achieving identity, livelihoods, and harmonious social relations in a post-conflict context. Exploring the contradictions and tensions within this “engaging men” approach has important implications for addressing forms of gendered violence and social rehabilitation in a post-conflict context. This research will contribute insights to the sociology of masculinities and critical development studies, while providing recommendations for local government officials, NGOs, and international policy actors.
Peter Kent-Stoll (University of Massachusetts-Amherst), The Racial and Colonial Politics of Urban Renewal and Relocation in Chicago, 1952-1972
Despite a long tradition in urban sociology of examining the political-economic and cultural processes that produce racial inequality, there remains little research in this field that seeks to understand how colonial logics and policies intersect with urban policies within the United States to shape these processes. I conduct a historical-comparative analysis of how the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Urban Relocation program intersected with Urban Renewal in Chicago from the 1950s through the early 1970s. The BIA Urban Relocation program targeted Native Nations for termination while promoting colonial assimilation through advocating rural-to-urban migration away from reservation homelands. Drawing on archival analysis of political and business elites’ correspondences and project plans; media coverage from mainstream, African American, and American Indian newspapers; and archived oral history interviews of Indigenous relocation experiences, I ask, what role did these projects play in racializing and colonizing urban space in Chicago? This study contributes to sociological theory on the racial production of urban space through centering Indigenous peoples’ urban experiences with colonialism and how they intersect with other racial projects in the city. More broadly, this research promises to shed light on the relations between the seemingly disparate but actually connected struggles regarding Indigenous sovereignty and urban inequality.
Austin Colby Guy Lee (University of Pennsylvania), Black Women on Mothering, Childlessness, and Social Class
Existing accounts of childlessness overwhelmingly focus on middle-class women, while the literature on poor and working-class women presupposes motherhood. Furthermore, while analyses of motherhood have well demonstrated that conceptions of motherhood vary by race, childlessness scholars have not similarly interrogated the role of race in altering childless women’s conceptions of childlessness. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Black mothers and childless women, my project examines how race, class, and gender shape formulations of womanhood for these women across the class spectrum. I consider how they navigate kin networks, partner, approach sex, and balance work and life. In considering how gendered expectations are shaped by race and class, this research will evaluate how gender interacts with other systems of difference to simultaneously structure these women’s behaviors, values, and life circumstances. Further clarity on this subject is critical to eliminating gender inequality and building a society wherein individuals experience self-determination regardless of gender. I will circulate the knowledge produced by this project to provide Black women and those invested in understanding the state of racial, class, and gender inequality with research that documents the experiences of those who are often overlooked in mainstream discourse on mothering and childlessness.
Todd Lu (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), At the Crossroads of Climate, Jobs, and Justice: Climate-Labor Partnerships in North Carolina
Green jobs programs, widely touted by climate advocates as solutions to stagnating labor markets and the climate crisis, have emerged as a basis for coalitions between environmental and labor movements. While cross-movements scholarship has primarily focused on building shared identities between union and environmental leaders to overcome organizational and cultural differences across movements, it is unclear how rank-and-file union members respond to the social, economic, and climate promises made under a green jobs framework. My project employs a mixed methods approach combining interviews with environmental and labor leaders, focus groups with union members, and a survey of American workers to explore why the “good green jobs” framework has received mixed reactions among American labor unions. I will compare how perceptions of green jobs advocacy vary among union officials, staffers, and rank-and-file union members embedded in manufacturing, construction and building trades, and the service sector. This project will contribute to broader theoretical debates on the cultural contexts of cross-movement coalition formation and how labor unions and workers navigate expectations of work amidst a climate transition. Moreover, I collaborate with environmental organizations and labor unions in North Carolina to uncover the opportunities and constraints for cross-movement coalitions under a framework of green jobs.
Jules Madzia (University of Cincinnati), Inequality in Medical Professionalization and Specialization
In recent years, medical schools in the U.S. have made major investments in diversifying their cohorts. Despite these efforts, students who match into the most competitive medical specialties are predominantly straight, cisgender, white men. This raises the question of why diversification of medical specialties has not matched the rate of diversification of medical schools. My dissertation addresses the following research questions: (1) How do medical students with one or more minoritized identities experience the process of medical professionalization? (2) Why do medical students with minoritized identities disproportionately match into less competitive specialties? (3) To what extent is this due to personal choice vs. forces of exclusion? To answer these questions, I am conducting in-depth interviews with 50-60 fourthyear medical students at schools across the U.S. I will present my findings and recommendations at national and institutional medical conferences, with the goal of informing the design of interventions that would help students with minoritized identities succeed in matching into whatever specialty they wish to pursue. Ultimately these efforts could reduce stratification across medical specialties and contribute to the creation of a medical profession that is representative of – and therefore, best equipped to care for – the populations it serves.
Erin McAuliffe (University of Michigan), Protection from What? Securing Legal Relief for Unaccompanied Minors
The ‘unaccompanied alien child’ (UAC), or unaccompanied minor, presents a dilemma for the state: they are seen simultaneously as illegitimate immigrants and vulnerable minors deserving of protection. Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS), a legal status available to undocumented immigrant youth, provides UACs with immigration relief and a pathway to citizenship but forecloses prospects for family reunification through terminating parental rights and denying recipients the ability to sponsor parents’ visas. Through observations of legal training webinars; in-depth interviews with social workers, lawyers, and judges; and court case analysis, I seek to better understand how immigrant youths’ deservingness and need for protection is conceptualized. Specifically, I ask: how do these practitioners understand the best interests of non-citizen youth, and why is SIJS pursued relative to other options? Through studying how actors interpret, apply, and legitimate conceptualizations of protection and deservingness for UACs, this study will contribute to our understanding of whom and from what the state is willing to protect, as well as how this conceptualization of protection contributes to immigration control. My research contributes to scholarship on migration, citizenship, and child welfare, and will support critical dialogue between practitioners and policymakers to promote social policy reform for youth seeking legal relief.
Nisarg Mehta (University of Chicago), “The World’s Largest Democracy”: Hindu Nationalism, Indian Statecraft, and the Indian-American Diaspora
This project applies a transnational ethnographic approach to examine a political paradox: despite overwhelming support for President Biden and the Democratic party in the U.S., a majority of Indian-Americans support Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). How do we reconcile Indian-Americans’ high civic participation and center-left domestic politics in the U.S. with their support for the majoritarian politics of the religious far-right in India? Drawing on ethnographic, interview, and archival data across four sites in India and the U.S., I follow the complex interconnections between Indian emigrants and their homeland as they settle and obtain clout as immigrants in a new land. What organizational and institutional factors lead to immigrants’ political re-activation and re-orientation to the homeland, despite their integration into their host country? What is the primary means by which knowledge of BJP political stances disseminate amongst the diaspora, and by which they organize their political support? How does the new media environment facilitate transnational political connections, and what are its implications? Insights generated from this project address central concerns in transnational sociology, the sociology of migration, and political sociology, and may be used to inform NGOs and policymakers, as well as community civic education programs.
Andrew Messamore (University of Texas-Austin), Poor People’s NIMBYism: How Community and Organizations Shape Tenants’ Insecurity in the United States
“Not-in-My-Backyard” (NIMBY) movements to stop housing development are a frequently cited justification for ending community control of housing in the United States. Unfortunately, focus on NIMBYs has led to the comparative neglect of “Poor People’s NIMBYism”—movements of tenants in minoritized and renter communities to slow development to protect affordable housing. My dissertation centers the standpoint of “Poor NIMBYs,” evaluating their major claims and the role they play in shaping housing insecurity. I will undertake three independent quantitative studies analyzing large city, state, and federal administrative databases to investigate: (1) if community cohesion protected renters during the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) whether community activism influences landlords’ use of property; and (3) if tenant organizations shape affordable housing policy. This study will challenge research that equates all forms of community organizing to NIMBYism, considering how coalitions of tenants’ organizations can create policy that benefits affordable housing. The research will create new methodologies and contribute to literature on housing insecurity, eviction, and urban governance in cities. The project will also examine how municipalities can cooperate with local organizations to protect tenants and empower activist voices in housing, such as BASTA-Austin, a tenants’ organization and collaborator who will benefit from the tools developed in this project.
Christina Nelson (New York University), Race, Age, and Spatial Inequality in the United States: Examining Local Manifestations of Demographic Change
In the typical racially integrated U.S. neighborhood, the average white resident is about a dozen years older than the average person of color. These racial age gaps have been largely overlooked in discussions of residential integration, despite their potential to shape how neighbors perceive and interact with each other. My dissertation addresses this gap by investigating the joint distribution of age and race in neighborhood space and its consequences for community life. I draw on multiple waves of Census data to examine how racial age gaps vary across different kinds of neighborhoods (e.g., urban/rural, gentrifying/stable/declining) and evaluate whether larger differences in age structure undermine integration’s long-term viability. Next, I leverage federal housing data and state voter files to explore how racial age gaps shape local housing markets and political outcomes. Through this research, I build a bridge between micro-level studies of neighborhood effects and macro-level research on national demographic shifts, and I offer a new lens through which to understand dynamics in integrated communities. By focusing on how racial age divergence manifests in the present day and at the local level, my work can make room for more nuanced conversations about the challenges and opportunities inherent in diverse societies.
Ke Nie (University of California-San Diego), Steer the Sound: Organizing, Regulating, and Practicing Musical Creativity in China
The Chinese popular music industry enjoyed a thirtyfold increase in market revenue in the past 10 years despite some of the heaviest regulations in the sector. This presents an interesting puzzle regarding how artistic creativity can thrive under an authoritarian regime’s tight control over expressive content. In this project, I study how industrial development, economic incentives, political interventions, and creative personnel shape musical creativity in China. Using computational methods to analyze an original dataset of over 190,000 songs collected from a music streaming platform, as well as qualitative analyses of policy documents, participant observation in a music streaming platform, and interviews with musicians, music producers, and label managers, I ask: (1) How is artistic creativity organized, regulated, and practiced in authoritarian regimes? (2) Under what circumstances and to what extent can artistic creativity thrive in places where expressive content is supposed to be tightly controlled? (3) How do economic incentives and political institutions shape artistic forms, and how do artists respond to economic and political pressure? This project contributes to economic and cultural sociology and highlights the political dimensions of artistic creativity. Moreover, my original dataset provides rarely accessible empirical data that is extraordinarily scarce in the existing social scientific study of cultural industries.
Shay O’Brien (Princeton University), Dallas: Kinship, Mobility, and Inheritance in an Elite Population, 1895-1945
As wealth inequality rises, social scientists are paying increased attention to the transmission of resources in elite families over time. My dissertation joins this conversation by introducing the first-ever full kinship map of an upper-class population in a U.S. city. The hand-coded dataset combines multiple archival sources to capture Dallas high society from 1895-1945 (n = 11,809), along with elites’ biographical information, family ties, organizational memberships, select property, and bequeathments. Multigenerational stratification studies usually measure families patrilineally, but I systematically include women, finding that over half of Dallas social elites (57.5%) were related in a single web that encompassed most of the city’s particularly wealthy and powerful people. I move back and forth between quantitative analyses and qualitative case studies to investigate and reframe classic topics in the study of elites, including “new money,” gender, and inheritance. Because the dataset is essentially a large-scale family tree, it is particularly legible to the public, and is well-suited to a national conversation about the urgently relevant history of wealth, inheritance, and inequality in the United States.
Ewa Protasiuk (Temple University), Precarious Labor Practices in Restaurants: Comparing Experiences Within and Between Stratified Workplaces
In the U.S. restaurant industry, practices that exacerbate precarity, such as low and/or variable pay, a lack of paid sick days and health insurance, and irregular schedules, have long been common. The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened existing instabilities while also creating new challenges. My research compares the experiences of workers in the present context. I will observe and interview workers in different segments of restaurant work in a large Northeastern city, including both customer-facing and non-customer facing jobs and across a range of restaurants that vary in size and price-point. I will also interview managers and industry experts; analyze organizational materials; and observe industry events for management professionals. This research will contribute to a better understanding of how precarious work is constructed, negotiated, and resisted in a paradigmatic service workplace. By probing variation in these patterns by worker race, ethnicity, class, job title, and workplace, I will shed light on how precarious labor practices relate to broader social inequalities. I will also help build knowledge about how managerial strategies to secure effort from workers unfold in this context. I hope to generate insights relevant to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers concerned with precarious labor practices, inequalities, and worker empowerment.
Iman Said (Pennsylvania State University), A Mixed Method Exploration of Police Behavior at Recent Social and Political Protests
In 2020, the United States was gripped by three parallel social movements: an outrush of support for the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd, discontent over state-mandated lockdowns to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic, and a wildly discordant presidential election. This historic spike in protest activity garnered significant attention from the press, policymakers, and members of the public alike. I use a mix of qualitative and quantitative data to investigate structural, political, and sociological characteristics that may account for variation in behavior between police officers and protestors, illuminating a path towards more effective police-protestor interactions. This project examines three research questions: (1) How do patterns of protest policing vary across social movements? (2) How does the political opportunity structure (e.g., access to media, financial support, political allies) of a place influence patterns of protest policing? (3) How do neighborhood-level sociological characteristics (e.g., disadvantage, trust in police, racial heterogeneity) account for variation in protestor violence? This project updates theory and research of social movements, protest, and police behavior. This research will directly contribute to creating targeted interventions to improve protest policing strategies and provide new direction for social movement organizations, with powerful implications for ensuring officer and citizen safety during protests.
Channing Spencer (Harvard University), Changemakers or Troublemakers? Employment Discrimination against Activists
Politics are increasingly entering the workplace and corporations are increasingly stepping into politics by taking public stances on social justice issues. This past year saw a wave of social activism from both employees and employers utilizing tactics such as boycotts, protests, and public denouncements to generate greater awareness of social, political, and economic inequities. Calls for change catalyzed a spate of public statements and pledges from corporations to act on these issues, underscoring the workplace as a critical setting for this social reckoning and corporations as key agents in the process. Despite the growing prevalence of social activism in and around the workplace, we know little about its implications on hiring behaviors and employment outcomes. Through original experiment and survey data, as well as archival data, this project examines two questions: What are the consequences of social activism for workers’ labor market opportunities? And, what mechanisms underlie these outcomes? This research provides insight into how activism, race, gender, and the law intersect to shape hiring behaviors and outcomes, generating insight for our understanding of labor market inequality and social movements.
Luis Edward Tenorio (University of California-Berkeley), Making the Transition: A Comparative Analysis of Formerly Undocumented, Now Legal Permanent Resident Latinos in the United States
Over the last few decades, research has illustrated various detrimental socio-economic impacts that stem from undocumented status in the United States. These findings lead us to believe that if undocumented individuals were able to obtain legal status via legal permanent residency or obtaining a green card, their socio-economic conditions may improve considerably. However, insights from existing research are mixed and limited. In addition, studies have outlined how perceptions of illegality—which may inform socio-economic conditions—are based more in racial tropes than actual legal status. This project seeks to understand what, if any, transformative socio-economic effects obtaining documented status has for formerly undocumented Latinos, as well as the mechanisms by which these occur. More specifically, I study the socio-economic life histories of formerly undocumented Latinos via in-depth interviews in three metropolitan areas—Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Chicago. The results of this project have implications for understanding the enduring effects of undocumented status and how legal status can catalyze social dynamics which produce measurable effects on people’s lives that go beyond rights-holding.
Mireia Triguero Roura (Columbia University), Race and Nation: Examining the Consequences of a Racialized Imagined Community
Amid concerns of increased populist right-wing movements in Europe and the U.S., I investigate one of the crucial tensions of modern nation-states: the ethnic origins of the “nation.” This dissertation builds on the literature of symbolic boundaries and understands “nation” as a cognitive category used to create social distinctions between those who belong in the nation-state and those who do not. Specifically, this project seeks to challenge the long-standing assumption in the literature that the dominant conception of the “nation” in the West is based on inclusive and civic dimensions. Using conjoint experiments, this project seeks to uncover the role of race and ancestry in Europeans’ and Americans’ conceptions of “nation,” even when they subscribe to civic ideals, and to show how these racialized conceptions of “nation” affect native-born citizens’ support for nation-targeted policies, such as redistribution and support for social welfare. I will leverage pre-existing survey data, along with new large-scale survey and experimental data, to measure the role of ancestry and race in majority groups’ perceptions of who counts as a “national,” as well as to show how these perceptions matter to understand decreased support for the welfare state in the face of rising immigration.
Jose Eos Trinidad (University of Chicago), Data Use and Organizational Change in Urban Schools: The Role of State-Society Partnerships
Organizations and institutions have used data for accountability and surveillance, often with mixed results. On one side, these data can influence organizational improvements, reduce biases, and catalyze equitable interventions. Yet on the other, they can lead to gaming strategies, corrupted social processes, and increased inequities. Recently, a particular form of quantification—the use of high school early warning indicators (EWIs) that help identify students at risk of dropping out—has been credited for increasing graduation rates, improving schools, and addressing dropout inequities. This dissertation critically interrogates factors that contributed to EWIs’ initiation, continuation, and variation. Situated in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York—districts that pioneered EWIs at scale—this research uses in-depth interviews and archival research to understand the dynamics of early warning intervention systems and to uncover the roles of external school improvement organizations like research, philanthropic, and community-based groups in institutionalizing data use. This research contributes to education, political, and organizational sociology by suggesting nuanced cases of organizational efficacy and improvement against the backdrop of often critical studies on school reforms, state-society partnerships, and quantification. These theoretical ideas have practical implications for facilitating school improvement, leveraging state-society collaborations, and maximizing organizational data use.
Mira Vale (University of Michigan), Data Values: Moral Entrepreneurship in Digital Health
The field of digital health adapts digital technology for health care and research. It has grown rapidly as the broader technology industry is confronted with evidence that digital surveillance can imperil privacy and worsen social inequality. Despite this backlash, the use of digital data remains largely unregulated. How do digital health innovators tackle moral questions in the absence of clear social or legal prescriptions? Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork at a digital health lab and interviews with researchers across the US, my dissertation explores how, as researchers develop digital healthcare as an industry, they also develop and disseminate ideas about how to do digital surveillance in healthcare morally. As they publish guidelines and host conferences about ethical technology, they become what Howard Becker called “moral entrepreneurs,” people who wield social power to prescribe moral rules. Ultimately, I argue these rules are consequential decisions about what digital health focuses on and whom it serves. My dissertation contributes to scholarship on how moral ideas are adjudicated amidst uncertainty and how digital technology markets affect social inequality. This project hopes to inform debates in bioethics and law as healthcare institutions develop principles for digital health and legislators work to regulate digital technology.
Patrice Wright (University of Virginia), Felt Inequalities: Race, Culture, and Emotion in Reproductive Healthcare
In the United States, Black women are more likely than White women to experience, and even die from, pregnancy complications. While existing scholarship focuses on individual bias and risk factors, we know physician-patient interactions are consequential. This dissertation analyzes these interactions, bringing together scholarship on the emotions of race and racialized organizations to consider how institutions create rules around acceptable emotional responses, and how these feeling rules, which vary by race and class, shape interactions, with implications for health and wellbeing. Using extensive qualitative data – including in-depth semi-structured interviews with Black obstetric patients at two time points and with health providers, as well as observations of patient-provider interactions on a hospital maternity ward – I ask: (1) How are race and class enacted in emotion-laden interactions; (2) how are these interactions shaped by the cultural repertoires and institutional positions of the people involved; and (3) how do Black women across class experience and manage these interactions? This project contributes to our understanding of the cultural impact of inequality in interactions, by highlighting the understudied emotional component of how marginalized populations respond to their cultural stigmatization. Moreover, it offers a new lens on Black women’s maternal health experiences, with implications for reducing maternal health disparities.
2021 ASA DDRIG Recipients
Aaron Arredondo (University of Missouri), Spatializing Critical Migration Studies: Racialized Spaces, Labor Rights, and Immigrant Justice Experiences in the Rural Midwest
Since the 1990s, Latinx migrants have shaped the demographic transition of agroindustrial towns in the rural Midwest. This project aims to examine how Latinx people within one such community negotiate and contest racialized systems of power, exploitation, and exclusion within and across public spaces and workplaces. Utilizing in-depth interviews, participant observation, photoethnography, and document analysis, I aim to: (1) assess how community and business organizations shape the (dis)involvement of Latinxs in public life and workplace governance; and (2) document how Latinxs respond to the everyday and organizational uses of space affecting their participation in racial justice and labor rights developments in a maturing migrant destination. This project centers Latinx experiences to identify specific ways social scientists can address racial hierarchies within public spaces and workplaces in similar migrant destinations. I will collaborate with labor unions and community-based organizations to publish policy briefs and conduct workshops informing residents and policy makers on human rights concerns within Missouri’s meatpacking industry. Data will be preserved through a community partnership with organizations and research institutes to support an open-source archive providing empirical evidence for developing a workers’ rights center in the region.
Daniel Bolger (Rice University), Spatial and Cultural Barriers to Social Service Access in Majority Black Neighborhoods
Reforms to the U.S. welfare system over the past 30 years have shifted much of the responsibility for serving low-income communities to local social service providers. Social service organizations, however, are often not located in poor neighborhoods, particularly those with a high proportion of Black residents. My project explores the implications of these changes through a comparative study of two predominantly Black neighborhoods in Houston, Texas. While the neighborhoods share many demographic characteristics, they differ in one important way: one neighborhood has a high number of social service providers, while the other has very few. Based on participant observation in local organizations, interviews with organization members and service recipients, and mapping of social service utilization patterns, I explore the ways that these two different neighborhoods shape how social service providers serve needy populations and how residents make decisions about where to go for help in times of hardship. In particular, I highlight how social service access is not simply about proximity, but is also shaped by cultural factors, like stigma, that influence how people provide and receive help. The results will have important implications for understanding who does (and who does not) benefit from changes in U.S. welfare policy.
Karolina Dos Santos (Brown University), Wards of Action: Internal and International Migration to Newark, NJ
Latino immigrants are moving to post-industrial, Black-majority cities in the East and Midwest. Despite the trend of Latinos and African Americans increasingly living in the same cities, there is a tendency to look separately at how these groups change their cityscapes, which misses how they periodically come together to address citywide problems. Thus, I ask, “How do African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and South Americans (Brazilians and Ecuadorians) collectively engage in citymaking in Newark, New Jersey?” I draw on three cases of successful interracial citymaking: The Black and Puerto Rican Convention of 1969 to elect Newark’s first black mayor, parental mobilization for the state to withdraw from city schools in the early 2010s, and the Newark Education Workers’ Caucus campaigning for awareness of Newark’s drinking water crisis in the present day. I use city, state, and private organizational archives to trace how each group developed their sense of identity and then incorporated these separate identities into a collective frame used to mobilize. I will disseminate my findings to K-12 teachers and students of Newark Public Schools to inspire future citymakers. This project will shed light on the agency and rich creative practices of people of color to proactively transform their cities.
Natalia Duarte-Mayorga (University of Pittsburgh), Understanding the Mobilization of the “Demobilized”: Social Movement Activism among Ex-Guerillas in Colombia
Little attention has been paid in the fields of revolutions and social movements to the aftermath of armed revolutions that ended through negotiated peace accords, beyond the focus on leaders. However, research shows that after wars end, some ex-guerrillas transition to electoral politics. More often, they disperse and reintegrate into society individually. Yet ex-guerrillas from the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) appear to be taking a different path, as they are living together in transition zones and engaging in sustained collective action. By analyzing FARC unarmed mobilization after the 2016 peace accords, my dissertation aims to understand the processes enabling some ex-combatants to continue to mobilize and the forms of mobilization they are taking after armed revolutionary struggle has ended. I do so by conducting interviews and ethnographic observations with FARC ex-combatants, local peasants, elites, municipal politicians, and international actors in six transition zones in Colombia. I expect to show how transition communities in certain geographical locations are key to the continuity and success of peaceful collective action. This project will contribute to understanding how revolutionary projects and wars change over time, how peace accords are appropriated from below, and how peacebuilding unfolds.
Dylan Farrell-Bryan (University of Pennsylvania), Deciding to Deport: Judges, Decision-Making, and the Bureaucracy of Removal from Immigration Court
With the intensification of immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation in the United States in recent years, an increasing number of immigrants find themselves in immigration court facing removal from the United States. Immigration court, or the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), is one arm of the federal immigration enforcement apparatus, in which more than 400 federally-appointed immigration judges act as the primary arbiters of hundreds of thousands of immigration cases. As the site where immigration judges decide who is deported and who can remain, immigration court is an important, yet understudied, institution in the immigration enforcement bureaucracy. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of detained and non-detained cases in one immigration court, I ask how judges, attorneys, and immigrants articulate and negotiate their preferences, norms, and constraints within the courtroom and how those shape immigration decision-making and the exercise of discretion. This research links judicial working conditions and constraints, as well as varying professional norms and preferences, to the process and outcomes of immigration removal hearings. This project explicitly contributes to research on legal decision-making and the bureaucratic values and beliefs revealed in the process of adjudicating important public, civil, and criminal justice issues.
Elly Field (University of Michigan), School & Neighborhood Racial Composition: How Change Unfolds When Linked by Policy and Preferences
Neighborhoods and schools are crucial contexts for children’s development, but in the United States, these contexts are both shaped profoundly by racial and income segregation. The segregation of neighborhoods and schools are mutually reinforcing, as most schools draw from residence-based school assignments and many parents choose homes based on school options. There is little research, however, examining how schools and neighborhoods undergo racial composition changes together. My dissertation examines three interrelated questions at this nexus of school and neighborhood segregation. First, I construct an original longitudinal dataset to examine how the racial compositions of schools and neighborhoods co-evolve over time. Second, I examine how these trajectories of change vary by school district policies, particularly school choice. Finally, I investigate the parental attitudes and preferences that undergird these decisions. I use stated choice experiments to identify why White parents opt out of local schools when they live in diverse neighborhoods. This multi-method project will produce a rich, descriptive picture of the complex patterns of segregation and the individual-level decisions that produce these patterns. This research will enable policy makers and researchers to address segregation patterns as they evolve and understand how changes in one domain spill over to another.
Sarah Garcia (University of Minnesota), Trends in Disability Among Working-Age Americans: The Role of Labor Market Polarization
My dissertation theorizes that deindustrialization—or the decline of industrial capacity due to social and economic change—has created a polarized workforce in which economic and social circumstances are driving up rates of disability among marginalized American workers affected by these changing conditions. I examine whether rising rates of disability among working-age Americans are attributable to deindustrialization, which has constrained job opportunities in some regions and expanded opportunities in others. My dissertation is the first to examine the relationship between the changing labor market and rising rates of disability in the working-age population at the county level. I link County Business Pattern Data on goods-producing and service-providing industries to National Health Interview Survey data on disability and demographics. I use a time-series analysis to highlight the chronology of labor market polarization as it relates to disability rates in areas more and less affected by deindustrialization. The findings of my dissertation will inform public policy debates and intervention efforts to increase labor demand and reduce the negative impacts of deindustrialization in regions most affected. A county-level analysis will inform social and economic interventions to increase employment in affected regions.
Upasana Garnaik (University of Texas-Austin), Relational Work and the Many Meanings of Property: Women’s Experiences of Family Property Disputes
Women’s property rights are a key indicator of gender equality. Despite gender progressive legal amendments, women’s access to property remains fraught. This is especially critical in rapidly urbanizing, developing economies such as India, where housing costs are skyrocketing. One might imagine that elite women would have easier access to house ownership; but my preliminary research reveals even socially privileged women find negotiations in family disputes immensely difficult. I will conduct 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in legal offices, mediation centers, and courtrooms, as well as in-depth interviews and archival research, to examine middle- and upper-class women’s experiences in family property disputes. Through this research, I will highlight the gendered, moral and contested nature of relational work in the intermingling of economic and intimate family life. By examining how women’s roles within the family are perceived, I will reveal how “deservingness” is constructed and how gender shapes this deservingness. Finally, I will explore how legal discretion operates in relation to gendered deservingness in familial relations. Research has documented the importance of property ownership on the physical, mental and economic well-being of women. This project seeks to expand our understanding of institutional and familial processes so as to inform legal policies and practices to be more responsive to women’s economic rights.
Annaliese Grant (University of Wisconsin-Madison), A Multi-Method Approach to Family Media Use and Social Class
Repeated studies have shown that low-income families spend more time engaging with media than middle-income families. Simultaneously, there is a lasting popular narrative that media use is necessarily ‘bad’ for child development and well-being, and that parents (often mothers, specifically) should limit their children’s ‘screen time.’ This narrative especially matters for the low-income families who engage with media most. My project provides a more nuanced understanding about the role of media use among families. I use multiple methods – statistical analysis of nationally representative survey data, interviews, participant observation, time-use surveys of participants in low- and middle-income families, and discourse analysis to investigate: 1) how do low- and middle-income families use media, and how might the meaning they create out of media use vary by class? 2) how does the discourse around family media use get imbued with classed, gendered, and racialized meanings, and how does this inform how family members navigate daily life? This project has the potential to expand how scholars study the lives of low-income families and what matters to them, give empirical evidence to understand some of the popular discourse around children’s screen time, and inform the work of institutions dedicated to promoting children’s well-being.
Sam Hobson (University of Michigan), The Intersectional Impact of Power: Social Movement Framing Processes of Black and White Food Justice Activists in NYC
As an ethnographer in New York City, I worked with activists in the food justice movement (FJM), which incorporates an anti-racist framework into its structure. Like previous scholars I found that, through FJM practices, White activists can reproduce structural racism. I also discovered that the actions of a number of activists of color with high socioeconomic status did the same. Consequently, my project asks: How are the intentionally anti-racist movement practices of structurally powerful food justice activists reproducing structural racism? I found that FJM activists use different power mechanisms in their movement work. The mechanisms seem tied to how these activists see the social problem in question (diagnostic framing), derive solutions to it (prognostic framing), and are motivated to address it (motivational framing). Through in-depth interviews, I will analyze the relationship between power and framing to reveal how activists’ experiences of race and class can impact the formation, dynamics, and outcomes of social movements. This is a critical matter for marginalized people. The decisions that are made on behalf of marginalized communities, through desires to help, can contribute to the material disparities that reduce life chances and cause premature death within these communities.
Jared Joseph (University of California-Davis), The Sociology of Malfeasance, Misfeasance, and Abuses of Power
White-collar offenders use their knowledge and skills to skirt the edges of law or use the courts to recast laws to suit their needs. I focus on different loci of power and discretion in three projects, asking: how do state actors and their private sector associates manipulate the structure of the state to control or exploit the legal environment? The first project interrogates the relationship between local political donations and municipal services to understand corruption on the ground. The second looks at uses of asset forfeiture laws by California law enforcement. These laws allow agencies to seize and sell private property if it was used as part of a crime, and understanding their application is vital for understanding concerns of police using their position for profit. My third project explores the national scale relationship between corporate firms and public harm using class action lawsuits and lobbying expenditures as a reaction to those suits. My dissertation will showcase the utility of computational methods and governmental data for studying sociological problems. Understanding how government power and positions are used to tip the scales for private interests is crucial for creating policy to curtail abuses of public office and betrayals of public trust.
Jillian LaBranche (University of Minnesota), Violence in the Classroom: Negotiating Historical Narratives in Rwanda and Sierra Leone
In 1994, Rwanda experienced a genocide. During that time, Sierra Leone was experiencing an 11-year civil war. Although these conflicts differed greatly, in both cases, civilians were mobilized to perpetrate violence against their neighbors, and civilians were targets of violence. Twenty years after these violent conflicts concluded, institutions in both contexts grapple with whether and how to teach their sensitive histories to the next generation. I will conduct interviews with educators and parents, and conduct participant observation of history classrooms. I will also analyze educational materials and truth commission reports from 26 different countries with recent experiences of civilian-involved violent conflict. I do so to understand how national narratives put forth by transitional justice mechanisms affect national curricula and how nationally-created historical narratives are adapted, translated, and taught in the wake of mass violence in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Previous literature and history have shown education has the potential to promote future violence in post-conflict situations; thus, what children are taught about violence has implications for a country’s future stability. This project will contribute to sociological literature by investigating the individualization of collective memory – how individuals, as part of broader educational systems, negotiate national narratives and their own experiences of violence in their efforts to educate younger generations.
Christopher Levesque (University of Minnesota), Beyond the Map: Immigration Court in New Destinations
This dissertation uses maps, participant observation, and interviews to study the U.S. immigration court system, focusing on courts in new immigration destinations in the Upper Midwest. Building on a recent American Bar Association report claiming that the immigration court system is “on the brink of collapse,” this research examines how the court system’s growing backlog of cases has undermined efficiency, due process, and legitimacy amidst growing legal cynicism. It also studies differences in the effects of the backlog by court location. Focusing on two courts, one in Omaha, Nebraska, with an above-average caseload and another in Bloomington, Minnesota, with a below-average caseload, I investigate how courtroom actors perceive their court’s fairness in light of insurmountable case-processing times. These courts mostly operate within new destination states seeing increased immigration levels, and also where immigrant detention and enforcement rates are high relative to the non-citizen population. This research can further policy goals to ensure that immigration court processes are fair, due process is given, and that forms of relief are possible before deportation occurs. To that end, the project also aims to provide the general U.S. public with resources that illuminate and explain the immigration court system and its procedures.
Chuncheng Liu (University of California-San Diego), Contested Algorithms of Trust: A Mixed Methods Comparative Study of Two Social Credit Systems in China
Our society is increasingly dominated by algorithmic systems that determine people’s life chances, such as credit rating systems. This multi-site comparative project explores a state-centered and a market-centered social credit system (SCS) in China that surveil and quantify trust in society with information and communication technologies. How are these algorithmic systems designed and implemented to translate the abstract concept of “trustworthiness” into numbers? How do people respond to and contest the different algorithmizations of trust? This mixed-method project will combine data from semi-structured interviews with tech workers, government officials, legal scholars, economists, and ordinary people; participatory observations from three government offices; text from policy documents, newspaper articles, and academic journal papers; and a nationally representative survey. I will construct the social trajectories of the two SCSs and compare them in three local stages – design, implementation, and everyday experience – as well as in the national discourse. This study will advance our understandings of technology and morality in the nexus of society, market, and state. It will reveal how power and human judgments are embedded in the seemingly objective algorithmic systems, articulating new forms of inequality as well as human agency in the digital age.
Maretta McDonald (Louisiana State University), Enforcing Child Support in the Deep South: An Intersectional Approach
Child Support Enforcement is an anti-poverty program with far-reaching consequences for its participants. Researchers focus on the outcomes of resident parents and children, while the experiences of nonresident parents are largely ignored. When nonresident parents are examined, scholars highlight differences in payment patterns across race and class, often without considering the historically disadvantaged position of marginalized groups within race- and gender-neutral state institutions. Additionally, urban bias in child support discourse leaves gaps in our understanding of policy implementation in rural areas. This doctoral dissertation examines how race, class, gender, and place matter in the outcomes of nonresident parents engaged with Child Support Enforcement. The research question will be answered through spatial analysis of county-level Child Support Enforcement administrative data and U.S. Census socioeconomic data; relational ethnography of court processes, including in-depth interviews of Child Support Enforcement professionals; and content analysis of court records. The findings will identify the patterns and mechanisms that influence nonresident parents’ interaction with Child Support Enforcement, with the potential to outline specific policy areas that could be addressed to create a more equitable system. This project will contribute to broader sociological understanding of racialized organizations, institutional discrimination, family, and masculinity.
Tessa Nápoles (University of California-San Francisco), Sorting and Stratifying in Housing: The Intersectional Impacts of Race, Gender, and Health on Housing Insecurity
Housing insecurity remains both a cause and consequence of illness and a central part of the relationship connecting poverty and poor health. While extensive sociological work has examined the role of the state, housing markets, financial institutions, real estate agencies, and the criminal justice system as primary institutions affecting housing inequality, a new institution has emerged as potentially central to the sorting and stratifying of the poor: the healthcare system. Health and illness are increasingly important criteria for allocating housing benefits and opportunities. I will conduct a relational ethnography that draws on observations and in-depth interviews with people experiencing housing insecurity, frontline housing workers, housing activists, healthcare providers, and private rental housing providers in the San Francisco Bay Area. This study will contribute to new understandings of how healthcare, housing, and social service institutions collectively affect the lives of individuals experiencing poverty, housing insecurity, and illness. It will also examine how healthcare, housing, and social service agencies interpret and implement housing policies and regulations, and how people are sorted and stratified for housing based on race, gender, and health status. This will provide clearer evidence for healthcare safety net institutions and policymakers to help them understand how social institutions reproduce and/or mitigate housing inequality.
Davon Norris (The Ohio State University), On the Fringes of Creditworthiness: Innovations in Credit Scores and Inequality in the Algorithmic Age
“All data is credit data.” This mantra serves as a shorthand for financial technology firms seeking to improve credit access by incorporating” alternative types of data such as educational attainment, shopping habits, and social media information into credit scoring algorithms. Rather than promote inclusion, critics worry such innovations may exacerbate inequality, particularly with respect to race. Yet, there has been little research into the conditions under which inclusion in markets occurs when algorithmic scoring processes are central. How do innovations in credit scoring and the regulatory apparatus around credit scoring inform racial inequality in credit markets? The project addresses this question via a multi-method design. First, I analyze policy documents to understand why regulators seem amenable to” alternative data today but were opposed to it in landmark credit regulation of the 1970s. Leveraging a nationally representative survey and interviews of individuals with low/no credit scores, I then ask how race shapes borrowers’ conceptualizations of what should be included/excluded in credit scores and how scores structure strategies for navigating markets among those on the fringes of creditworthiness. Ultimately, the project centers innovations in credit scoring to illuminate what the future of racial inequality may look like in an algorithmic age.
Ian Peacock (University of California-Los Angeles), Organizational Causes and Consequences of Delegated Immigration Enforcement in the United States
Local governments in the United States have increasingly become involved in immigration enforcement in the last few decades. This project draws on new data and two naturally occurring experiments to examine (1) how and why US localities initially became interested in key federal-local immigration enforcement arrangements called 287(g) agreements, and (2) what consequences such agreements have after enactment. The project tests hypotheses about how public official associations (POAs), such as the National Sheriff’s Association and Major County Sheriffs of America, shape local agencies’ priorities and actions around immigration enforcement, and whether participation in immigration enforcement further escalates local agencies’ commitment to immigration enforcement. Understanding the role of POAs may offer insight into how local participation in immigration enforcement acquired wider legitimacy, despite local and broader political objections. The project also helps show how participation in immigration enforcement creates new internal interests and constraints in local agencies. Understanding how local public officials respond to these internal and external organizational factors can illuminate several points of intervention for mitigating the adverse humanitarian consequences of immigration enforcement in the US.
Alicia Sheares (University of California-Berkeley), Getting Ahead: The Strategies of Black Tech Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and Atlanta
Technology is one of the nation’s fastest-growing and most transformational industries, and yet the sector is plagued with racial disparities, particularly affecting Black professionals. This project investigates how Black tech entrepreneurs understand challenges and advancement opportunities in two key sites: Silicon Valley and Atlanta. Wealth is plentiful in the former location, but Black workers comprise an extreme racial minority and often experience barriers to professional advancement. Conversely, investment funding is scarcer in the latter, yet the city is home to the highest concentration of Black tech workers, who have an abundance of professional opportunities both within and outside of the tech sector. Drawing on 96 semi-structured life course interviews with Black tech entrepreneurs and investors, participant observation at technology networking events, and content analysis of media reports, early findings indicate that Black tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and Atlanta have similar understandings of racial inequality, but are embedded within distinct racial technology fields that limit and facilitate their entrepreneurship trajectories in different ways. The results from this project will generate insights related to the racialized dimensions of organizational fields, racial capitalism, and the varied experiences of Black entrepreneurs.
Derek Siegel (University of Massachusetts-Amherst), Trans Women and Reproductive (In)Justice – How Race, Class, and Gender Shape Experiences of Family Formation and Parenthood
Inequalities manifest at every stage of human reproduction, as people form families and parent children under increasingly precarious conditions. Within emerging literatures on trans parenting and reproduction, however, most studies focus on trans men and overwhelmingly center White people’s experiences. By conducting semi-structured interviews with 60 transgender women of diverse racial and class backgrounds, I will examine how race, class, and gender shape trans women’s ability to 1) become parents, and 2) sustain families. I also explore how interpersonal relationships (with partners and communities) and institutional contexts (such as employment, health care, and the law) produce and reinforce disparities. This project will contribute to several debates within the sociologies of gender and family. For example, how do people form parenting identities, what counts as family, and how do dominant mothering ideologies exclude and harm marginalized parents? While most scholarship and media involving trans women, especially trans women of color, focus on vulnerability or victimhood, my focus on family formation and parenting provides a much-needed and holistic understanding of trans women’s everyday lives. These data will be of interest to healthcare providers, movement organizers, and communities who are stakeholders on the topic of trans women and their families.
Adam Storer (University of California-Berkeley), Do Social Movements Influence How People Evaluate Their Jobs?
Do social movements influence how people evaluate their jobs? A number of contemporary social movements have captured the American imagination over the last five years, highlighting important social and political issues, receiving sustained media attention, and sometimes leading to policy change. In this project, I investigate whether three social movements—Fight for 15, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter—have” altered the ways that individuals interpret their own experiences in the workplace. In particular, this project studies whether social movements” alter how low wages, gender discrimination, and racial discrimination factor into job evaluations. This project studies both the short-term and lasting impacts of social movements by constructing two datasets from ten national firms employing low-wage frontline service workers. First, I web scrape data from Glassdoor.com, a website where workers have posted quantitative and qualitative reviews of their jobs since 2008. Second, I will conduct a survey experiment of workers at these firms. The research project will contribute to understanding the changing landscape of social and political thought in the United States, while quantifying the lasting cultural impact of contemporary social movements in the workplace.
Melissa Villarreal (University of Colorado-Boulder), Documenting the Undocumented: How Mexican Immigrants Navigate Long-Term Post-Disaster Recovery
Much of the current disaster literature adopts a social vulnerability perspective, which considers how political, social, and economic factors influence pre-disaster preparation and post-disaster recovery. Even with this focus, however, there remains a lack of literature on immigrant populations and their long-term recovery trajectories. My dissertation project is an intersectional, multi-level analysis of Mexican immigrants and their disproportionate vulnerability in post-disaster recovery. It builds on fieldwork I conducted in 2019 in Houston, Texas after Hurricane Harvey. That study examined the role of community-based organizations in assisting Mexican immigrant community members to move forward in housing recovery despite anti-immigrant policies at the federal, state, and local levels that passively and actively limit their access to resources. This phase of the research includes a content analysis of disaster policy documents in the U.S., follow-up semi-structured interviews with community-based organizations to assess the progression of Mexican immigrants’ recovery, and interviews with Mexican immigrant households to understand their recovery from their point of view. This project will address the challenges and needs of Mexican immigrants in post-disaster recovery in a way that takes into account their race and gender identities. Findings will be of value to stakeholders involved in post-disaster recovery work.
Haley Volpintesta (University of Illinois-Chicago), The Safe Children’s Act: Interagency Collaboration and the Governance of Youth in the Commercial Sex Trade
Activists in Illinois drafted the Safe Children’s Act (2010) to remedy punitive approaches to juvenile prostitution. The Safe Children’s Act decriminalized prostitution for youth under 18, reframing youth in the commercial sex trade as abused children, and reassigned juvenile prostitution cases from the criminal punishment system to the child welfare system. Youth, however, continue to be incarcerated despite their immunity from prosecution and status as abused children. I will draw from archival data and in-depth interviews with law enforcement agents, child welfare workers, and youth in the commercial sex trade, to illuminate the effects of this legal transformation in Cook County, IL. This research considers age alongside race, class, and gender to reveal theoretical gaps that produce innocent/guilty binaries and forms of exclusion, contributing to sociology of prostitution and critical trafficking scholarship. Theoretically, this research explores the relationships between criminal punishment and child welfare systems and how punishment and protection converge. By examining how actors in disparate systems collaborate to regulate commercial sex and marginalized youth, this research will contribute to sociological theories about the state and the social construction of childhood while responding to burgeoning policy debates about the decriminalization of commercial sex.
Jinpu Wang (Syracuse University), Is Corruption in the Receiving Country a Barrier or Incentive for Entrepreneurial Migrants?: The Case of Chinese in Ghana
China’s expanding presence in Africa has sparked heated debates centering on its impacts on the development and governance of African countries. This ethnographic study contributes to these debates by focusing on how new Chinese migrants in Ghana, West Africa, navigate their social and economic integration into the host society by developing strategies to deal with corruption. I examine how new Chinese migrants mobilize social networks to overcome the barriers of opaque information channels and porous regulatory infrastructures in African markets. Focusing on the formation and operation of patron-client ties, my study will illustrate how Chinese migrants rely on cultural techniques cultivated in China’s market transition to negotiate local norms and codes that underpin rent-seeking activities in Ghana. I hope to contribute to interdisciplinary discussions on corruption, state-market relations, and development. For a broader audience, my findings will aid policy analysts, governments, and civil society in Ghana and Africa to better understand the backgrounds of the newly-landed Chinese business actors, what drives them to enter Africa, what economic rationales and cultural logics underlie their actions, as well as potential strategies for integrating them into a framework of global governance.
